“Dark Star”

April 8, 1972

Wembley Pool, London, UK

Written by: Grateful Dead and Robert Hunter

The band’s definitive psychedelic jam epic, with wondrous versions in nearly every era it appeared.

In April of 1972, the Dead commenced a major European tour, almost two months long and a definitive musical turning point. Elongated fast ’n’ furious blues jams and Wild West saloon swagger were dosed with jazzier, subtler improvisations, the Dead’s musical shorthand cribbed from the simultaneous soloing of Dixieland music. Introduced to listeners via a short and far-out 7" in early 1968 and the standard side-long take of Live/Dead in 1969, the April 8th, 1972 version is not a “Dark Star” of gaping existential canyons jagged with feedback. The exuberance of the band listening to itself in this half-hour house of mirrors can be heard as Garcia’s Alligator Stratocaster quickly descends from the song’s head, Lesh offering bubbly harmonic counterpoint; accents of cymbals and short drum rolls make Weir’s offbeat rhythmic attacks more potent and clear space for Keith Godchaux to pound out leads on his piano. A collective breath is taken after the first and only verse, until Kreutzmann’s kick drum cajoles the rest of the Dead, including Pigpen behind the organ, to percolate a melody, pause for a brief freak-out, and wrap up the song with sunburst triumph. –Buzz Poole

What to Listen For: The charging major key jam that erupts near the end of this version also features a fiery debate about what will follow, eventually sliding perfectly into Weir’s “Sugar Magnolia” and a version of Pigpen’s “Caution (Do Not Stop on the Tracks)” filled with crackling heat lightning.

Key Later Version: October 31, 1991 Oakland Coliseum, Oakland, Calif.At the unexpected and emotionally charged five-show wake for promoter Bill Graham, the Dead’s staunchest supporter, “Dark Star” became a time machine when novelist Ken Kesey delivered a Halloween eulogy and the band flashed back to the Acid Tests, eight musicians so locked in that you can imagine walking between all the notes.

“The Other One”

April 26, 1972

Jahrhunderthalle, Frankfurt, West Germany

Written by: Bob Weir and Bill Kreutzmann

A high-wire version of one of the band’s premier jam vehicles in nearly every era. After dropping “Cryptical Envelopment” in 1971 (minus a brief ’80s revival), “The Other One” became the jam center of many second sets, its triplet-based gallop providing a tension-laden motif for high energy improvisation, perfect for segues, creating a jam canon second only to “Dark Star”.

Released in 1995 as Hundred Year Hall, the Grateful Dead’s April 26, 1972, show in Frankfurt is a tour de force display of pretty much everything the Dead were capable of at this juncture, from earthy Pigpen-led R&B to country-fried workouts to daring improvisation. The latter is best exemplified by the sprawling, 36-minute wonder that is this night's reading of “The Other One.” Originally bookended by Jerry Garcia’s “Cryptical Envelopment,” by 1972 the song had been both pared down and expanded, providing the Dead with a vehicle for their most untethered—and sometimes most aggressive—jams. Coming out of a rollicking “Truckin,’” the Frankfurt “Other One” bursts into action with Bill Kreutzmann's relentless “tiger paws” rhythm and Phil Lesh's rumbling bass, leading directly into a kaleidoscopic roller coaster ride. Jerry Garcia darts madly around with fleet-fingered, often feedback- and wah-drenched guitar work as pianist Keith Godchaux pounds out Cecil Taylor-isms. Even the usually jam-averse Pigpen gets into the act with a stabbing organ part. Before the Dead finally slip into a gorgeous “Comes a Time,” Bob Weir bellows the now-famed lyrics about their deceased mentor, Beat icon Neal Cassady—and there's no question that his gonzo spirit was at the wheel during this performance. –Tyler Wilcox

Key Earlier Version: February 27, 1969 Fillmore West, San Francisco, Calif. Sounding fairly goofed up as they introduce the last portion of the evening’s early set, the band dazzles with a complete version of the “That’s It For the Other One” suite, with Garcia’s spiraling “Cryptical Envelopment” intro and outro.

Key Later Version:February 5, 1978 UniDome, Cedar Falls, Iowa. A reliable source of headiness for much of the Dead's career, “The Other One” was especially good in the late ’70s, as on this explosive 1978 rendition.

“China Cat Sunflower” > “I Know You Rider”

August 27, 1972

Old Renaissance Fairgrounds, Veneta, Ore.

Written by: Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter/traditional, arranged by Grateful Dead

Grateful Dead-brand sunshine in a can links baroque psychedelia to a folk song the Dead arguably made an American classic. During the ’70s, “China > Rider” was a first-set standard, usually the place where the band would initialize their improvisational chops on any given night. In the ’80s and ’90s, it moved to the second set opener slot, a guaranteed crowd favorite to settle fans back in.

To get the absolute purest dose of what the Dead sounded like, lick your finger and stick it in the middle of any rendition of this classic pairing. For one, the duo nicely charts the main axis of Dead songwriting, with effervescent psychedelia blending into an electrified rearrangement of a traditional American folk song. But more important is the zone between the two songs, so humbly notated with a “>”, where the magic truly blooms. For several glorious minutes, the band exists in a quantum state between the two compositions, navigating that space with an uncanny group-mind. In August of 1972, the Dead played a benefit in sweltering heat for the Kesey family creamery outside Eugene, Oregon. Like most things with the Grateful Dead, what should be a calamity is instead transcendent, with “China > Rider” (the “>” is silent) one of several sublime performances. –Rob Mitchum

Key Slightly Later Version: June 26, 1974 Providence Civic Center, Providence, R.I. In 1973 and 1974, the “China > Rider” transition included a theme based on Simon & Garfunkel’s “Feelin’ Groovy”, and this version includes both a rare intro jam and a turn through the descending melody that Deadheads call “Mind Left Body,” after its resemblance to a Paul Kantner song.

“Bird Song”

August 27, 1972

Old Renaissance Fairgrounds, Veneta, Ore.

Written by: Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter

A fragile goodbye doubles as a perfectly titled lift-off for some of the band’s most lilting and delicate jams.

Janis Joplin, the Grateful Dead's friend and occasional tour mate (not to mention Ron “Pigpen” McKernan’s on-again-off-again lover), died of an accidental heroin overdose in October 1970 at the age of 27. A few months later, the Dead unveiled “Bird Song,” Robert Hunter and Jerry Garcia’s touching farewell tribute to the singer. Not so much an elegy as a reminder to—as one of Joplin’s signature tunes puts it—get it while you can, “Bird Song”’s studio incarnation appeared on Garcia’s first self-titled solo LP. But the song really took flight onstage with the Dead in 1972, especially during a show at Veneta, Oregon’s Renaissance Fairgrounds, legendary among tape traders for decades before being officially released in 2013. Following a bittersweet, gently psychedelic verse and chorus, the band slides into a long, meditative modal jam, Garcia’s guitar sounding simultaneously mournful and ecstatic as it soars into the upper register, his cohorts circling patiently below. Bill Kreutzmann, handling drumming duties alone, gives the song a restless, jazzy lope. A sublime ensemble performance, made only slightly less sublime in the Sunshine Daydream concert doc, which features an undulating, naked fan perched directly behind Garcia, getting the sunburn of his life. –Tyler Wilcox

What to Listen For: The way Kreutzmann launches the band back into the jam with a fluttering drum fill.

Key Later Version: October 1980 Radio City Music Hall, New York City, N.Y. The Dead introduced an unplugged—but no less exploratory—“Bird Song” in 1980, a high-flying highlight of the band’s Reckoning live LP.

“Playing in the Band”

November 18, 1972

Hofheinz Pavilion, Houston, Tex.

Written by: Bob Weir and Robert Hunter

The Dead’s archetypal meta-anthem, with every version from 1972 through 1974 diving into deep, heady, and swinging space-jazz. Part of Bob Weir’s first major batch of original songwriting and included with an abnormally good studio jam on 1972’s Ace, “Playing in the Band” was played as a standalone first set closer in the early ’70s, migrating to the second half of the show in later years where it was often split apart by one or several songs inserted between the song’s beginning and final chorus.

1972 was the year of “Playing in the Band,” played more often than any other song and site of some of the band’s deepest explorations. Bob Weir swaggers his way through the meta lyrics of the three-minute pop form, which then melts on a downbeat directly into the outer reaches of a jam that comes as close as the Dead ever achieved to what jazzheads refer to as fire music. Swelling insistently through several movements, the rhythm section pilots—Billy Kreutzmann approaching Elvin Jones-like intensity and Phil Lesh constructing architectural leads only to explode them with double-stopped, low-frequency bass bombs. Interlaced throughout, Garcia’s strobing guitar creates a zoetrope-like effect of white-hot intensity. When it’s time for re-entry, Donna Jean Godchaux wails as though birthing the chorus’s reprise from her very loins, and one is overtaken in ecstasy by the feeling of having emerged triumphant following a journey into the unknown. –Ariella Stok

Key Later Version: November 6, 1979, The Spectrum, Philadelphia, Pa. Keyboardist Brent Mydland had joined the band earlier that year and already his deep rapport with Garcia is on display, while the arrival of new synths provides a whole new sonic space-time-continuum for this “Playing” to tear asunder.

Jam

July 27, 1973

Watkins Glen Motor Speedway, Watkins Glen, N.Y.

Written by: Grateful Dead

Well, duh. But not as duh as you maybe think.

Oh, of course the Dead almost always jammed, but it was less often that they produced a piece of improvisation from a standing start. It certainly happened occasionally, but never in front of a larger audience than at the Watkins Glen Motor Speedway in July 1973, which itself held the title of largest concert in rock history until Rock in Rio unseated it in 2001. Sharing a bill with the Band and the Allman Brothers in front of an estimated 500,000 people, the three groups played unannounced public warm-ups in front of the assembling crowd the day before the ticketed event, with the Dead deciding (naturally) to play two warm-up sets. One second they’re tuning, and then a cymbal swell drops them into a fluid musical conversation that hints at songs they haven’t even written yet. Mostly it’s just an easy-going dialog between the quintet where one can hear the the chillest iteration of the band’s single-drummer 1971-1973 peak, Bill Kreutzmann’s free dance holding together star-splatter by Garcia, Lesh, and the gang. –Jesse Jarnow

Key Avant-Dead Jam: September 11, 1974 Alexandra Palace, London, UK. A number of 1974 performances featured duet performances by Phil Lesh and proto-noise piece Seastones composer Ned Lagin, some of which segued from Lagin’s “moment forms” into the Dead’s set as the band joined in, including this magical improvisation from London’s Alexandra Palace that flows from modular synth eruptions towards the friendly skies of “Eyes of the World.”

Key Later Version: October 26, 1989 Miami Arena, Miami, Fla. By the ’80s, the Dead’s free jamming mostly isolated itself in the guise of their second set “Drumz/Space” segments, the primary forum for the band’s remaining avant-garde leanings and musique concrete-like MIDI explorations, as on this post-“Dark Star” exploration from 1989.

“Weather Report Suite: Prelude/Part 1/Part 2: Let It Grow”

November 21, 1973

Denver Coliseum, Denver, Colo.

Written by: Bob Weir/Bob Weir and Eric Anderson/Bob Weir and John Perry Barlow

Perhaps Bob Weir’s most ambitious composition, sad autumnal folk bursts open into elemental Garcia leads. Played 46 times in 1973 and 1974, Weir dropped the gentler first two segments of the piece when they returned in 1976 with second drummer Mickey Hart, though “Let It Grow” remained consistently in rotation through the remainder of the band’s career, a late first set home for improv.

First played as a complete piece in September of 1973, Bob Weir’s “Weather Report Suite” was a coming of age for the band’s rhythm guitarist and youngest member. First fiddling with the baroque chords of the “Prelude” during earlier jams, the full composition was perhaps Weir’s earthy answer to Jerry Garcia’s “Eyes of the World” for the Wake of the Flood era. In Denver on November 21, 1973, the “Suite” is both fragile and reassuring to start, each instrument falling into place. With subtle interplay between Lesh’s unique lead bass, Garcia’s shimmering slide, and Keith Godchaux’s Fender Rhodes setting up a call and three-part-harmony response, it all moves towards the breaking storm of “Let It Grow.” There, Kreutzmann’s light and lean drums lead tempo shifts in a dynamic and subtle jazz jam, opening up to the wild beyond. –Cori Taratoot

Key Later Version: June 24, 1985 River Bend Music Theater, Cincinnati, Ohio. The entire band launches full-throttle into a furious, tight and edgy version, with Garcia finding raging solos in every open space.

“Here Comes Sunshine”

December 19, 1973

Curtis Hixon Convention Hall, Tampa, Fla.

Written by: Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter

Gang harmonies and bright syncopation made for a song whose original incarnation lasted barely a year. Inspired by Abbey Road-era Beatles, “Here Comes Sunshine” was one of over a half-dozen Garcia/Hunter songs debuted February 8, 1973 at Stanford University, some (but not all) destined for that year’s self-released Wake of the Flood.

Dick Latvala began collecting Dead tapes while working as a zookeeper in Hawaii in the late 1970s, swapping bundles of weed—which he packed into reel-to-reel boxes and cavalierly dispatched through the U.S. Mail—for more and better music. Latvala, who went on to become the Dead’s official tape archivist, picked this show for the inaugural installment of Dick’s Picks, the series of official releases of live shows he curated for the band. He’s said that this particular iteration of “Here Comes Sunshine”—a cheerful song about the 1948 flooding of the Columbia River basin, in Vanport, Oregon—inspired that release, which in turn appropriately finally opened the band’s archival floodgates. As a blind introduction to the Dead’s strange musical alchemy—the ways in which, on certain nights, all five players seemed to operate as a single, glinting organism—it remains unimpeachable. –Amanda Petrusich

“Stella Blue”

December 19, 1973

Curtis Hixon Convention Hall, Tampa, Fla.

Written by: Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter

An aching, luminous Garcia ballad, home to some of his most soulful singing and guitar playing. Most often, “Stella Blue” was performed as an epilogue to the band's furthest out jam segment of a given night, a tender affirmation of spirit following the symbolic (and actual) psychedelic journey the second set represented to many in their audience.

Even to the most frenzied and infatuated fan, Jerry Garcia can remain an inscrutable frontman. But “Stella Blue”—which, in this version, drifts out of an arch and dissonant feedback jam, ethereal and spooky, like a genie emerging from the neck of a bottle—betrays a specific fragility. This is arguably Garcia at his most human. Stella Blue is a minor character in Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Pale Fire, but the song’s lyrics, written by Robert Hunter, feel more personal; they recount a grim existential spiral, in which feelings of hopelessness become increasingly difficult to beat back. Some heads prefer the later, two-drummer versions, but there’s something about the starkness of this one that feels especially moving. “In the end, there’s still that song,” Garcia promises. For a moment, he sounds nearly buoyant. –Amanda Petrusich

Key Later Version: July 13, 1984 Greek Theater, Berkeley, Calif. Though the band doesn’t sound as if they’re on the same page until Garcia starts singing, the song’s quiet moments (especially its first three minutes) are mid-’80s Garcia vocals at their soulful and imperfect best.

“Eyes of the World”

June 18, 1974

Freedom Hall, Louisville, Ky.

Written by: Jerry Garcia and Robert Hunter

A just-exactly-perfect almost-breezy jam for a summer’s day.

“Eyes of the World” first appeared live in 1973, as the Dead began to introduce some more jazz-inflected architecture to their open-ended jams—a fruition, in part, of some ear-opening exposure on earlier shared bills with Bitches Brew-era Miles Davis. “Eyes” had a catchy main guitar riff (weirdly similar, I’ve noticed, to the one in Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky”), a beguiling “lazy gait,” crypto-cosmic lyrics, and—in its first couple years, anyway—a long, raging coda that went through a series of key changes and funky signatures. There are many splendid examples of this coda from 1973 and 1974. But I always go back to 6/18/74. Despite some shrill vocals and Schroeder-y piano, this version has an uncharacteristically crisp beginning (they were more precise when they had only one drummer), and great interstitial Garcia solos. The song’s long, flowering run-out seems almost composed, as their best improvisations tended to do—an impression strengthened a few years ago when a pianist named Holly Bowling performed the Louisville “Eyes” note for note. –Nick Paumgarten

Key Later Version: September 3, 1977 Raceway Park, Englishtown, N.J. After 1975, the Dead scrapped the coda, and over the course of the next decade, the renditions got faster and cokier, almost to the point of parody—an acquired taste. Along the way, though, there’s 9/3/77. The tempo is just right, and Garcia’s leads catch fire.

Key Much Later Version: March 29, 1990 Nassau Coliseum, Uniondale, N.Y. Fans of later Dead are fond of the of this version featuring Branford Marsalis on saxophone, capturing the sextet and guest in full arena-Dixieland toot.

“Truckin’”

September 18, 1974

Parc des Expositions, Dijon, France

Written by: Jerry Garcia, Bob Weir, Phil Lesh, and Robert Hunter

Perhaps the Dead’s most identifiable song, a boogie with an occasional backdoor into the cosmos. A rare autobiographical group composition, “Truckin’” was designed to be a modular Road Song, with Robert Hunter supplying new verses as the band had further adventures—he even wrote some on request in the late ‘70s but the band never sang them.

The Grateful Dead are all about The Road, and “Truckin’” is one of the all-time great Road songs. It got some burn on FM radio in the ’70s and positioned the Dead in a cultural moment connected to R. Crumb and CB Radio. It also gave the group its defining lyric: Without “Truckin’,” headline writers wouldn’t have words to describe all of our long and strange trips. Live, it was a supremely flexible song and one of their most-played, fitting neatly into acoustic sets but also stretching into long inspired jams. Bill Kreutzmann’s shuffling groove is key, chugging and choogling forward with a steady-state insistence not unlike the motorik beat of krautrock. Sometimes Garcia solos in Chuck Berry mode, but in 1974 he was taking it to slightly weirder places. In front of a few hundred people in Dijon, France, their smallest crowd in years, this version finds the song at its jazziest, with mind-bending guitar interplay. –Mark Richardson

“Morning Dew”

October 18, 1974

Winterland, San Francisco, Calif.

This folk song about two lone survivors of a nuclear apocalypse entered the rotation in 1967 but really became a Garcia set-piece and gut-puncher once the band slowed it down in the early ‘70s. As the Dead’s premier revelatory ballad, coming after the chaos of a jam or space, it almost always laid ‘em flat, despite its oblique lyrics and simple chord progression. As time went on, Garcia often seemed to pour more into it than pretty much anything else. The song has two crescendos, each building from delicate quiet to cathartic guitar-god keening and fanning. At Winterland, on October 18, 1974, during the band’s last stand before an 18-month touring hiatus, they performed a titanic version that made it sound like they were quitting for real, at the peak of their powers. –Nick Paumgarten

Key Later Version: October 12, 1984 Augusta Civic Center, Augusta, Maine. A powerhouse song even when Garcia was in dire health, it somehow suited his husky voice and haunted aspects, as it does on this ragged but glorious heart-tugger from a special evening.